As its AIDS work was blowing up, VaxGen was working to get access to Fort Detrick's anthrax vaccine technology. It had friends. VaxGen Chief Gordon is a long-time acquaintance of Philip Russell, the former chief of Army medical research. Both sit on the board of the Albert B. Sabin Vaccine Institute in New Canaan, Conn. Fort Detrick gave VaxGen the license to its anthrax technology in October 2003. Russell, then an adviser to HHS, stepped in to settle a fight between government bureaucrats over whether VaxGen would pay royalties to the government. "He said, ‘Dammit, I don't care what you do, but settle it--don't leave this company in the lurch,'" recalls Gordon.

A year later HHS awarded VaxGen the BioShield award. Gordon and Russell adamantly deny their relationship had any influence on VaxGen's selection. "I scrupulously stayed away from talking to him, to the point where I felt terrible about it," says Gordon. The company now quotes Russell in its media kit: "We have a lot of faith in this vaccine, and we believe it's the right way to move forward to protect the country against anthrax."

In a CNN/Money piece, Jeffrey Marshall, an analyst for Fairview Capital Group, said VaxGen has the "closest ties with the government" versus competitors for other Bioshield contracts. Which given the Russell and Slater connections may be true. But examination of Vaxgen and its CEO and President Lance Gordon's history lends even more weight to Marshall's opinion.

In 1999 [VaxGen] won an $8 million government contract to test its AIDS vaccine, but the official negotiating the contract for the Centers for Disease Control got in trouble for simultaneously talking to VaxGen about a job.

And in 1998 the New York Times reported that OraVax's vice president (OraVax was then headed by Gordon) may have influenced a high-level government meeting to shape the US government's biodefense strategy to benefit Oravax financially, while not adequately disclosing his ties.

Is VaxGen capitalizing on its ties to the government in order to score hundreds of millions of dollars in government contracts?